When Chazz Palminteri was in Denver back in 2009 to promote his one-man play A Bronx Tale, he finished the interview with this daring aside:
“A Bronx Tale is a great movie, and it’s a great play,” he said. “And I will tell you something else: One day it’ll be a great musical, too. You watch.”
Seven years later, Palminteri was proven right. Again.
“I just knew,” Palminteri says now of the fully fleshed 1950s musical that played exactly 700 performances on Broadway before hitting the road on its Denver-bound national tour. “It had everything a musical needs. First off, it had a great story. It’s a classic. The characters I wrote are archetypes. If I could get great music, I knew it would click. And it did. It’s poetic.”
But it took a decade, starting back in 2006, for Palminteri to pull it off. “I would say out of all the things I’ve tried — writing, directing, acting and producing — musicals are the hardest by far, because there are just so many things that could go wrong,” Palminteri said.
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